December 22, 2006—"Never again." After the carnage of the
Holocaust, world leaders invoked this phrase as their vow to
eliminate the specter of genocide.

Now that commitment is being put to the test in Sudan's Darfur region. While the U.S. has declared the crisis a genocide, the United Nations has yet to do so.

So Mark Hanis, the grandson of four Holocaust survivors, has decided to take things into his own hands. Haunted by memories of growing up in a small Jewish community where many bore concentration camp numbers on their arms, Hanis founded the Genocide Intervention Network, which supports the African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur.

"The fact that [my grandparents] were able to make it out alive and that I'm able to be here today," Hanis says, "shows that there is hope, that there can be change, and we can make it a commitment that whenever we say, Never again, that we're serious about it."